Dear Atheists: what would convince you God/Christ is Real?

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that your friends story demonstrates exactly how compelling or convincing dreams and visions can be. It's helpful to remember that being convinced or compelled and being right - or some belief being true or accurate, aren't the same thing. It doesn't matter whether or not your friend really had a vision of vishnu or if vishnu exists, what mattered, at least as I understand it, is that your friend was convinced and compelled by this vision regardless of it's factual status.

The real headscratcher for me in discussions like these is that it seems like the faithful feel like they're climbing mount improbable. It's just so hard to convince people of a thing,...except... it's not. Rightly or wrongly we're super easy to convince or compel. The sorts of things that could convince or compel me are the same sorts of things that convince or compel them. We're not a different species, lol. I know, I know, we get alot of bullshit about intelligent design and we can easily say "wrong again nudger, that shit doesn't convince me!". Granted - but it didn't convince them either.

For the most part, insomuch as people are religious as opposed to be culturally X - they're convinced or compelled by the force and duration of their parents convictions in the same. Yet another example of how what's accurate and what's convincing can be split apart. The likelihood of the assumption of religion (any religion) goes down as our age goes up - if it wasn't beaten in or didn't stick by early adulthood it probably wont ever become a thing. Just considering the group of people who do end up becoming genuinely religious, conversion by vision or interaction (or just visions and interactions in general) are basically unicorns. We hear alot of people mouth words that would seem to suggest such a thing - but that's almost certainly going to end up being figurative theolinguistics at work. Pretty easy to figure out, too. Internal or external? Left, right, or stereo? Male voice or female? What language? Any accent? Did the voice match the apparition in any of these relevant categories?

When you boil away the fat of how the religious have been trained to express themselves, you're going to end up with a deep and compelling experience. That's what they felt, or what they remember. If it happened to any of us, still all just people, there's a credible expectation that we would believe it implicitly as we do with pretty much everything else we feel. So...whenever we reach the point where a nut tells us that they're completely out of ideas -in so many other words-, we ought to appreciate how incompetent said nut is for failing at such an easy task.